The English split infinitive: A comparative study of learner corpora

Abstract

The split infinitive in English has been controversial for over a century. Whilst a prescriptive grammar rule forbids infinitive splitting, it seems that modern grammar academics, as well as users, accept and allow for its occurrence. The approval of split-infinitive structure has also been clearly substantiated by plenty of convincing linguistic evidence: real data from native-speaker corpora confirms its existence in different varieties of English. The present study, using the data collected from Thai Learner English Corpus (TLEC), shows that professional English learners evidently produce a greater number of split infinitives than intermediate learners, whose proficiency level is lower. According to a comparative study of the two learner corpora, the higher the proficiency level of the learner, the greater of the production of the split infinitives, and low-proficiency learners seem to use split infinitives in a more specific context.

Examining novice writers’ perceptions of formality

“…Nonetheless, there are studies that have indicated that there might be differences among proscribed features in terms of their frequency in academic prose. Most notably, split infinitives, while commonly proscribed by style guides, have been found to occur with moderate frequencies, indicating a shift toward increased acceptance of this feature (e.g.,Perales-Escudero, 2011;Supakorn, 2013). We may therefore expect this feature to behave somewhat differently from the other two proscribed features.Examining novice writers' perceptions of formality…”